


what harm you can help

by ncfan



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Chance Meetings, Gen, Nonbinary Gerry, Pre-Canon, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27126427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Gerry had seen Diego Molina walking up the street to wherever they were staying with Mum many times before. They'd never seen someone else with him before. There was someone with him now.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Agnes Montague
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	what harm you can help

**Author's Note:**

> [ **CN/TW** : Implied/referenced child abuse, trauma, implied existential crises, speculation on severe injuries]

May came down on them with a complement of sullen, droning storms and walls of equally sullen, humid heat. It was the sort of weather that kept you trapped inside, and the storms were just bad enough that Mum’s flights kept getting canceled, keeping the two of them trapped in London. Mum’s temper was getting… Gerry was heading outside even when it was drizzling, lately. It had been a while since they had been able to get out and look at what was still the same, and what had changed. They did like to look around and see if anything had changed, though in their neighborhood, change crept up on them slowly, like it was trying to settle in without anyone noticing, so it couldn’t be uprooted before it was entrenched.

But that was the only way change could be safe, in no danger of being smashed into a hundred thousand tiny pieces and the thing that sought to change left at a total loss. Either you change so slowly that no one around you marks it until it’s too late to turn back the clock, or you change lightning-fast, so quickly that anyone trying to seize the change and strangle it would never grab anything but empty air. That was Gerry’s experience of change, anyways. However much of a choice they’d ever had about changing, anyways.

That day in May was caught between the sullen heat and the sullen storm, the skies full of angry, grumbling clouds, but only a faint breeze to never succeed in galvanizing the skies towards opening, and none of the scent of water hanging in the air to give a promise to stamp in those clouds. The air conditioning in Mum’s office was broken and the repairman was late, which wasn’t helping her temper _any_. She’d set Gerry to act as lookout at one of the windows overlooking the street, watching for any sign of a van, which left Gerry a bit closer than they’d have liked to be—what they _really_ wanted to be doing was something, anything involving the new paints they’d picked up their last day in Genoa before heading back here, but Mum wanted them where they were, and the argument that followed ended the same as any other: Gerry doing what Mum wanted—but at least Mum was too busy looking over some of the papers they’d gotten last week to really pay any mind to them.

(Mum’s attention could be… uncomfortable. Actually, ‘uncomfortable’ was a tame, gray, sheep-like little thing compared to what Gerry was really after, but they could only circle round the edges of that one. Trying to actually lay hands on it was… it wasn’t advisable. It really, really wasn’t, and the part of Gerry that wanted to peel themselves open so their body couldn’t hide any secrets from them anymore wasn’t strong enough yet to do battle with that shy part of themselves and hope to do anything but lose.

Mum’s attention could be _uncomfortable_ , but lately, Gerry thought that their attention might be getting a bit uncomfortable to Mum, as well. It was… Just call it a hunch. Gerry didn’t know where the hunch came from. Actually, that was a lie, they knew exactly where the hunch came from. It came from the same place that made shop assistants flinch and mumble and stare down at their feet when Gerry went to ask them for help looking for something. It came from the same place that had made Mum shake her head and murmur ‘ _What a disappointment_.’ Gerry knew. They couldn’t _not_ know.

Mum seemed perfectly happy to have Gerry paying attention to her. Until she didn’t, anyways. Until she wanted them watching out of the window or keeping watch at a door or checking the new box of books for any sign of silverfish. Gerry didn’t know what they felt about it. Sometimes, it put a red-hot surge of triumph in the pit of their stomach. Sometimes, it made them feel like they’d just been kicked in the stomach, and what was them just radiated from the map of pain the bruise left behind. For the most part, they tried not to feel anything at all.)

Standing by the window had soon turned to sitting in the windowsill, their long, gangly body bent at an awkward, boxed-in angle in the frame. The windows in the office were all open, trying mostly in vain to catch a cool breeze, and this was the best way to try—the only way, really, if you weren’t worried what people would think of your being crouched in the windowsill like an overgrown bat—to catch a breeze that would actually deliver on what it promised instead of tormenting with the whisper of it. Gerry watched the street, and they watched the sky as well, as the day lengthened on into the afternoon. The clouds rolled dense and dark over the patchwork of buildings and parks, so dark that no hint of sunlight could be properly seen and only a hazy, smoky orange glow emanated from the sky, the streetlamps that had kicked on about an hour ago in spite of the time of day glowing wan and fitful far underneath, like dimming embers at the edge of a bonfire.

The next breeze to hit Gerry’s sweaty face was hot and so humid that it had no relief in it at all. They let out a long, snorting breath through their nose. The repairman was late. The repairman had been late since lunchtime. Mad as Mum was about it—she gave no word, but Gerry could see it gleaming in the stiff set of her back and the glassy sharpness (sharp enough to cut, and who knew how deep?) in her eyes—Gerry thought _they_ were gonna get mad if they had to sit here for much longer, when they could have been anywhere else in the house, anywhere the air was actually working and the ceiling fan did more than just bat hot air around.

A pinprick of heat, so much sharper and more insistent than the wall of muddled humidity trying to make Gerry’s mind into soup, ignited at the back of that same mind, burning steadily like a candle flame in still air, slowly growing hotter with every moment that passed. Before they entirely knew what it meant, they were calling out, half-there, “Mum, Molina’s coming.”

“Oh?” Through the fog of being half-there, Gerry couldn’t make out too much of her tone, but it drifted like the lapping sea at low tide. “Well, he does have an appointment, I suppose, even if he is a bit early. At least _someone_ shall enjoy themselves in this furnace today.”

The desk chair’s old, rusty wheels screeched as Mum pushed away from her desk, and Gerry jumped, hitting their head against the window frame with a dull thud and coming _thoroughly_ back to themselves as stars erupted behind their eyes. (Fucking miserable way to do it, _oww_.) In a moment, Mum was there, peering past Gerry down into the street, the mingled odor of her sweat and her sharp, flowery perfume putting a sickly miasma in Gerry’s nose and making their throbbing head spin, until they managed to blink the spin away.

For a long moment, a long, unraveling moment in which Gerry’s heartbeat had a chance to slow, then pick up again, Mum peered out the window, her keen eyes scanning the street below them, lips pursed. She stared out that window for a _very_ long moment, before her face darkened, a thunderclap like the one that refused to rattle above them playing on her skin. For the first time since calling out, Gerry really looked at the street themselves, and they realized with a jolt (a stupid jolt, yeah, but still, there it was) that they couldn’t actually see Molina anywhere on the sidewalks on either side of the road.

“Peeking ahead, are we?” Mum needled them reproachfully, pulling a sour face as she withdrew her head from the window.

Gerry tried to fit a few different answers in their mouth at once, only for Mum to shake her head dismissively and pull a small, paper-bound package from a shelf in the back of the room, before returning to her desk. “Ah, enough. Just be sure to say when Diego actually appears; _lay eyes_ on him first, Gerard.”

And in a few minutes, they did. The pinprick of heat in the back of their mind had grown to a something like a hot coal, radiating heat that managed both to creep down into their bones, a dry heat that sucked the sweat straight off of their skin, and not touch them at all. It felt… it felt like something happening just outside of themselves, or something else that Gerry wasn’t really sure how to describe. (Maybe if they’d had a few minutes more, maybe, maybe…) Molina was… Well, damn, a man who put a feeling like that in the back of Gerry’s mind was hard to miss. Much harder, these past couple of years.

Gerry spotted Molina turning a bend in the street, head held straight and hands stuffed in the thick jacket he wore in spite of the heat (whether or not he actually felt the heat as something that could actually do any harm to him, Gerry really didn’t know; they supposed it made more sense if he didn’t, but it wasn’t like these things made sense consistently, was it?) as he made his way towards Pinhole Books. Gerry opened their mouth to call out to Mum once more, but paused when they realized that Molina was not alone.

Following after Molina at a distance of maybe six feet, head bowed, was a woman. She had long brown hair that fell over her face like a shroud, and like Molina, the way she was dressing would have gotten her more than a few stares, if there had been anyone else on the street with them to stare: long-sleeved turtleneck and long skirt that fluttered with each step of her feet, and as she drew a little closer, Gerry saw that she was even wearing close-toed shoes as well, what looked like ankle boots or maybe loafers (She wasn’t close enough for Gerry to tell _that_ , not quite; Gerry had good eyes, but they weren’t _that_ good, not yet).

There was… there was no question that she was with Molina, that she was following after him deliberately. She’d come out of the alley so soon after him, and she’d crossed the street with him, hurrying to keep up with his longer strides. Gerry tilted their head, a puzzled frown stealing across their lips as the two drew closer and closer to the shop. Molina had been here a few times before, and Mum had met up with him out of country sometimes, and every time he had come to call, he’d been alone. He was part of a cult, Gerry knew that, he was part of a cult of avatars of the Desolation, but he’d always come alone. Part of the business arrangement with Mum, or maybe he just didn’t want anybody in the cult watching when he tried and failed to get something out of Mum. Gerry didn’t know, and for the most part, Gerry really didn’t care, though they’d admit that there were times when curiosity itched at them like a mosquito bite fixing to become a welt. But they _had_ noticed that Molina was always alone, before, and for somebody else to be with him now…

Molina looked up, and almost immediately, his eyes lit on Gerry sitting crouched in the windowsill, like he’d been expecting to see them there, though the last time Gerry checked, precognition wasn’t one of the Desolation’s strong suits. At last, Gerry called out, never taking their eyes off of Molina and his companion, “Mum, he’s here. He’s got somebody else with him, too.”

“What?” This time, Gerry was rooted enough in themselves to pick up instantly on the hint of annoyance in Mum’s voice. “We have spoken about this—“ the desk chair screeched again, though this time Gerry was prepared enough for it that they at least managed to avoid hitting their head against the top of the frame “—and I did think he understood. Diego is _not_ a man I would expect to just disregard everything I said to him; I do wonder how he would feel about all business between us ceasing, though…”

She reached the window again, peering past Gerard’s head and shoulders down into the street. Her hair was falling over her face, and Gerard could not make out her expression, but it was hard not to notice, even through the renewed miasma of sweat and perfume, the way her shoulders stiffened.

“Mum?” Gerry prompted, suddenly uncertain.

Mum’s only response, at first, was to plant her hand on Gerry’s arm and tug, and keep tugging until Gerry had gotten down from the windowsill and was standing beside her. Still tugging them, now towards the door, she told them, perfectly smoothly, “I want you to wait in the back garden until I call for you.”

“What, why?” Maybe they shouldn’t have… The maybes weren’t relevant. Gerry thought they would always have balked. What, she insisted on dragging them all over the world to her business meetings, but now, now that she was having one in their _home_ , they had to be shunted off to the back garden like a stupid kid who couldn’t be trusted not to—

“Gerard.”

Mum was looking at them. Mum was smiling at them, that bright, keen smile that sharpened her teeth like a file. Mum’s hand was on their face, palm cool against their cheek, long, manicured fingernails digging ever so slightly into their skin, and that, more than anything, stole the words from Gerry’s mouth.

Seeing that she would have silence, Mum’s smile widened, just a hair. “A little curiosity is good for a growing boy—“ that grated, grated in more than one spot, in more than one way “—but you aren’t ready for Diego and his…” Some of the sugar dropped out of her mouth, and for a moment, Gerry thought she might frown. “…Companion. Not together. Wait in the back garden.”

That… was not an answer. It wasn’t an answer, and Gerry had balked at ‘Because I said so’ when they were six, so they really did _not_ understand why Mum thought they wouldn’t balk at it at fourteen, but she was still tugging them along, grip too tight to be broken, until they had gotten to the top of the stairs, and just before she started tugging them down the first step, the front door slammed shut.

Gerry froze, and though they did not understand why, Mum froze as well. They just stood at the top of the stairs together, Mum’s grip on their arm growing so tight that their hand began to tingle, as footsteps sounded downstairs. Then, Molina appeared, and Mum took her hand from Gerry’s arm, and fixed a fresh smile to her face, one Gerry had seen her pull out of the catalogue several times, though never with Molina.

“Mary.” The note of forced cheer in Molina’s voice scraped against Gerry’s ears like iron wool. (Someone was a match for Mum, today, and Gerry still didn’t know why.) The odd contortion that spasmed across his face when his eyes fell on Gerry standing at their mother’s side scraped only slightly less. “Mary’s little watchdog.”

Mum planted her hand between Gerry’s shoulders and pushed hard. At the same time, she called out, with a cheer that Gerry had never been able to tell if it was forced or not (and especially not in the situations when being able to tell the difference would have served them a _lot_ better than not), “Ah, Diego. Come upstairs. I believe I’ve found what you were asking me about the last time we spoke.”

“Excellent. I was beginning to think—“

He was always up the stairs so quickly, and Mum always so quick to shut the door. It was just that usually, Gerry was on the right side of that door, and they could hear him finish that sentence unobstructed. Standing halfway down the stairs, scrubbing at their arm and wanting to do the same with their back, straining to hear snatches of conversation that would not come to them, not at this distance, and not through that door, that was—

Whatever.

Whatever, Gerry told themselves, fighting down something hard and scalding that had crawled up into their throat. They didn’t even _like_ sitting in on Mum’s meetings, not when all they were allowed to do was sit still and listen. It was all whatever. Whatever.

Now, what to do?

Mum told Gerry to wait in the back garden. Gerry did _not_ recall Mum telling them they had to go straight there. Mum had said nothing of the sort, Mum was so anxious to get Gerry out of the house that she’d not even laid down any conditions, beyond the most basic of them. Gerry could…

What could Gerry do?

Well, shit. They _had_ moved most of their art supplies up into their room, since that one shipment of books with the, erm, the _special_ silverfish chewing their way through the pages, the bindings, the boxes, the _furniture_ , and their skin on that first occasion when they hadn’t realized that they needed to be wearing _much_ heavier gloves, when they hadn’t realized that these silverfish were so… Which words had Mum used for them? Hell, which words _hadn’t_ Mum used for them? Gerry had learned some new words that day, that was for sure, and Mum had almost seemed _happy_ when Gerry added their voice to the mix. Erm, not _very_ happy, of course. She mostly looked like somebody who wished she had a flamethrower. Or maybe a nuke. But she did smile at them once or twice, and smiled smiles that didn’t look like they were about lash out and cut their skin.

Gerry thought that they might have left a box of pastels in one of the rooms downstairs, though they didn’t remember which one, exactly. And they had so many sketchbooks stuffed in alcoves and shadowed spots around the house that they were sure to find one that wasn’t full eventually, if they looked hard enough and long enough. But they didn’t want to take the pastels outside into the garden; they weren’t stupid enough not to realize what the sticky heat would do to them, and they _liked_ those pastels, too. Not something they wanted to ruin, just to have something to do out in the back garden for however long it took for Mum to remember they were back there.

The rest of their art supplies was up in their room, and… Yeah, no. Mum would hear them on the stairs. They could be quiet on stairs, but they had never figured out how to be quiet enough to avoid drawing Mum’s attention to them. No matter the time of day, no matter whether or not they were wearing shoes, no matter whether or not they were carrying anything that would have weighted them down, the stairs still creaked too loudly, Gerry’s footsteps still reverberated too loudly, and Mum’s ears were too sharp. They did not have to go straight to the back garden. They knew how Mum would regard it if they made a detour back to their room on the way outside.

Also…

Also, where had that woman gone?

Gerry paused in the corridor, frowning deeply. They were _sure_ that woman had been accompanying Molina. It had _not_ looked like she was just following behind him by coincidence. Mum’s reaction had been… Yeah, Gerry still wasn’t sure what that was about, but they didn’t think she would have reacted that way if the woman was just a random stranger who’d been following behind Molina on the way to parts unknown. They went to the front door, and peered out around them, but they saw no sign of her, no long brown hair, no turtleneck, no fluttering long skirt.

Their hand still clamped down on the doorknob, even after they had pulled it gently closed, Gerry paused once more, their frown only deepening. She… she must have been in the house somewhere. But she hadn’t gone upstairs with Molina. So…

Erm.

Gerry began to peer inside the rooms downstairs, slowly, quietly, not certain whether they should be conducting something more thorough in the way of an inspection, not certain whether Mum might have actually meant something by wanting them outside, just knowing they couldn’t leave it. Curiosity itched under the surface of the skin, deep enough that the only way to ease the itch was to indulge it. Also, if that woman was fucking around with their pastels, Gerry was going to have to do something. They weren’t sure _what_ , but they were going to have to do _something_.

Gerry looked all over the downstairs, anywhere a room was usually unlocked and a customer could have gotten into. They found nothing, and was just about at the point of wondering whether or not they and Mum could both have been wrong, when a hint of movement caught their eye, and a snare of heat set a hook in their mind.

The kitchen. They hadn’t checked the kitchen.

To be fair, you wouldn’t really _expect_ it to be the kitchen. Their kitchen was at the very back of the ground floor, a cramped little space barely large enough for the flimsy little scratched table and the two ancient chairs that sat out around the table in the center of the floor. Mum… yeah, Mum didn’t make much use of the kitchen. Most times, she was too busy at meetings and other work to bother with the oven or the stove, and at most others, her patience ran so thin it was see-through, and she wasn’t bothering with anything that took longer than about five minutes to get ready. Mum taught Gerry how to use the microwave and the oven and the stove a couple of years ago, and since then, Gerry hadn’t seen Mum hang around in the kitchen for more than ten minutes at a stretch, not unless it was to make herself more coffee.

And to be really fair, Gerry didn’t hang around in the kitchen much, either, for mostly the same reasons as Mum, though they thought they might have been a _little_ more patient about it than her—ten minutes was longer than five minutes, after all. But the kitchen was at the back of the house. And the only door out into the back garden was through there.

Mum probably didn’t want Gerry looking too hard at whoever Molina had brought with him. But Gerry couldn’t get out into the back garden without going through the kitchen, now _could they_? And it would have been rude to not at least say hello to a guest, now wouldn’t it?

(That second point… Gerry didn’t rate their chances of flying it as a flag and winning much higher than they rated their chances of catching the moon in a bucket of water. Mum fussed at them over and over again to at least say hello to customers—this, even though she wouldn’t let them say anything _else_ when she had meetings—and if she hadn’t gotten her nose so badly out of joint today, she probably would’ve been hissing instruction-threats in Gerry’s ear even as she shoved them down the stairs. Gerry didn’t always remember. Actually, that was a lie, if only by obfuscation. For the sake of accuracy, Gerry forgot a lot. Sometimes on purpose. Mum despaired, and warned often of the way these things would damage Gerry’s relationships with their own clients, one day, never mind that Mum didn’t even know if Gerry _wanted_ clients or not. Any attempt to hide behind politeness would only end with Gerry dragged out from their hiding place, biting optional but kicking and screaming definitely _not_. They’d try it out anyways. They wouldn’t be satisfied until they had.)

Alright. Al-fucking-right. What was so different about this woman, that seeing her would make Mum act so fucking weird?

(Maybe violent. Maybe noxious. Maybe deathly. Those options all prickled at Gerry’s mind, but the snare was stronger, especially now that the snare of heat had been joined and intertwined with a snare of curiosity.)

Gerry proceeded slowly, cautiously—they weren’t stupid, no matter what Mum thought—until they were standing a few feet from the kitchen door. None of the lights were on in this part of the house, and only a feeble few rays of light shone through the kitchen windows. There, in the kitchen, was a figure, sitting huddled at the kitchen table, nursing some coffee poured into one of the mugs that had been sitting out on the drying rack this morning, the chipped powder-green one, decorated with fading asphodels.

It… Gerry thought they might have been mistaken earlier, at least in a certain sense of the word. When they saw Molina and his companion walking up the street towards the shop, they had thought that companion to be an adult woman. But now that that person was sitting in the kitchen nursing a mug of coffee, and Gerry could get a closer look at her, they thought that they might be a girl, instead. A teenaged girl, maybe.

Or maybe not. Maybe it was just wishful thinking on Gerry’s part. She was… She was tall, they could tell that much. Even sitting hunched at the table, she had to fold in on herself a little bit to sit at the chair, much the same as Gerry did when they sat at that table (there was a _reason_ they didn’t sit at the kitchen table much, anymore, beyond the lack of desire to be in the kitchen in general), though not quite to the same extent. Her long hair fell over her face and shielded much of her side. In the dim, feeble light filtering into the kitchen, her hair looked to Gerry’s eyes about the color of a magnolia leaf they had once seen, weeks after it had fallen from its tree, once it had turned dead and brown and hard. It wasn’t… It just wasn’t what they would have thought of as a Desolation color.

She wasn’t what they would have expected from Desolation, in general. Not her hair. Not her long, baggy skirt or her baggy turtleneck that had to be at least two sizes too big, maybe three. Not her sheer stillness. Gerry didn’t know exactly what _to_ expect from the Desolation, beyond fire and destruction, but they didn’t expect this. Maybe they just expected something a bit more lively? They didn’t know.

As they stood close by the kitchen doorway, staring at the girl, other thoughts seeped into their mind, not from outside, but maybe from further in, just finally finding their way up to the front.

It was… yeah, it was a girl, not a woman. It was a girl, who looked like she might be about five years older than Gerry, if that. Alright, so Gerry couldn’t see her face, not properly. But there was something to her gangly body, to the hints of bony, knobby wrists Gerry could see around her floppy sleeves, that suggested youth, and youth the way Gerry was young, not youth the way a twenty-something was young. She was… Gerry stared at them, their eyes lingering over her still, pale hands, long, bony fingers and uneven fingernails. Gerry scrubbed at their arm, but the pain from Mum’s grip seemed less important to them now. They tried to suck in a breath. Tried.

It… It wasn’t all that normal, to see someone around Gerry’s age, in circles like this. Gerry couldn’t remember the last time they had seen another kid in a situation like this one, but they thought that the last time they had, the last time they had, they…

They tried to suck in another breath. Tried. It wasn’t working very well for them.

 _It’s rude to interfere in other people’s personal affairs, Gerard_. Why was it so easy to hear Mum’s voice, even when Mum wasn’t around? Gerard fought and fought and fought for a moment of peace, well and truly away from her, and yet, even when she was nowhere in sight, even when they knew that it was impossible for her to be close by because they knew where she was and she was _somewhere else_ , they could still hear her voice ringing in their ears, as clearly as if she was standing right next to them.

 _It’s rude to interfere in such affairs, Gerard_. Nowhere to be found, and yet, her voice rang clear as day in their mind. It always did. It always followed them around. Maybe Mum knew that. Maybe that was why she ever let them out of their sight at all.

Or maybe not. Or maybe it was just some abnormality in Gerry’s own mind, something they could chalk up to the thing that crawled around in the back, occasionally peering out at the world with vicious, insatiable hunger, or maybe just something that would have always been in Gerry’s head, no matter what had happened to them down in the—

Gerry opened their mouth, and a moment later they shut it again with a sharp click. They didn’t know what to say. They wanted to say something, but they weren’t sure what. (Part of them wanted to peel her open and learn in _exhaustive_ detail every step that had brought her to the kitchen table today, nursing a mug of stone-cold coffee and clearly Desolation-touched, even if she didn’t seem like what Gerry would have expected from somebody with the Desolation. They tried to ignore it. They had run into another member of Molina’s cult a while back and started asking them questions, and the guy had glared sourly at them and told them that if they hadn’t been Mary Keay’s kid, he would have burned their wagging tongue straight out of their head. _Rude_ , but also memorable. Gerry hadn’t forgotten.)

But here was somebody who looked like they could have been about Gerry’s age, given a couple of years, and there was power whispering around her. Gerry could hear it murmuring in the air. Gerry could smell it as it crackled, so distant, but still, it was the unmistakable scent of smoke. What was meant to burn, in the end, they could not tell, and could not tell if they cared to find out. It was… Gerry swallowed. They really didn’t see too many other kids that often, in this sort of situation.

Their feet were removing, without much input from the mind. Maybe being in the same room as her, maybe having gotten her attention, maybe these things would be enough to galvanize them into actually finding something to say to her. Maybe it wouldn’t even end with her threatening to burn their tongue out of their head. (Would it really burn, though? Would the tongue really burn when it could bubble and crackle and _melt_ instead? These were the sorts of things that Gerry really shouldn’t have been asking themselves about, let alone contemplating taking to the Internet later to dig up more about, but here they were.)

Gerry set their first footstep down in the kitchen, and immediately, the wall of heat hit them, as hard and unyielding as any wall of bricks could have hoped to be. They faltered, head swimming, sweat gathering in fresh beads upon their brow. Still, the girl sat hunched over her coffee, hair spilling over her shoulders and onto the table, face totally hidden, hands never bringing the mug to her lips.

There were no sweat stains forming on her shirt or her skirt. Gerry couldn’t see any sweat glistening on her hands. They didn’t stop to think about that until later, until after the last puzzle piece slotted into place, and really, it was past the point when the information could have done them any good, so why even bother turning it over in their mind? If this was supposed to be some sort of game, even one they played only with themselves, they’d _lost_ , so why keep on playing.

In the moments before everything slotted into place, Gerry let out a harsh breath that sounded a bit like a steam whistle and _felt_ like one, too, and strode forwards. “Sorry.” Sure enough, speech was easy now that they were actually in the room and, barring hearing loss, the girl must have been able to hear them, even if she hadn’t looked up. Gerry marched over to the window over the kitchen sink, starting to fiddle with the rusty latch. “The air con in Mum’s office broke down today.” The window went up with a harsh screech that made Gerry’s teeth rattle in their mouth, just a little bit, but now there was only the mesh screen between them and open air, and a whisper of a breeze played on their face. “Guess the repairman’ll have another spot to check when he—oh!”

Oh.

The girl had looked up from her coffee mug.

Later, Gerry would be able to drink in the drink in the sight of her face in its entirety, but for now, all they could see, all they could focus upon, was her eyes.

Her eyes were… It was impossible to make out the color. Her eyes were alight, but not with joy or anger, or any other emotion that you would have expected to put light into someone’s eyes. Her eyes were alight with fire. They burned as twin points of flame, and if they did not seem like twin infernos, that was only because they also seemed so very, very distant.

It was… It was… When Gerry stared into the girl’s eyes, it was hard to look anywhere else. When Gerry stared into the girl’s eyes, it felt like they were falling into them, sinking deeper and deeper into the heat that enveloped them and the whole kitchen. It felt like they were breathing steam. It felt like their blood was turning to steam.

“It will pass.”

Gerry blinked, trying to clear their mouth of that strange feeling, like they had been breathing in smoke, though their lungs didn’t sting with any of the ache they would have expected.

She… she had spoken, hadn’t she? The girl had lifted her voice up to speak for the first time, and Gerry couldn’t even remember what it was she had said.

They swallowed hard, wincing on the dry, scorching air that shot down their throat. After a little cough, they finally managed, “Sorry?”

She stared at them a long moment, a moment in which the heat seemed to become slightly less, though only enough that the pressure on Gerry was slightly less, not enough for them to breathe easily. After that long moment had passed, she said once again (this was what she had said the first time, hadn’t it been?), “It will pass.” Her voice was quiet and wispy, and rasped slightly, as if she rarely spoke at all.

She said nothing more, and Gerry stopped and sucked in a long, deep breath. It still felt like breathing in steam. But they clutched at the edge of the kitchen counter, and found it cool, still, in spite of the heavy, rolling heat clinging to their skin. They clutched at the edge of the kitchen counter, and breathed, and breathed, and breathed, and though the air never came quite to the coolness it should have enjoyed when the air conditioning was working and turned to the temperature that Gerry _knew_ it had been, gradually, the air became cooler. Gradually, the air lost the worst of that oppressive, invading heat.

They stared at the girl more closely, now that they could, and drank in the sight of her, silent and considering and just a little wary.

Oh.

Oh, indeed.

Her long hair, well, long save for a fringe that fell just short of her eyebrows, hung dry and frizzy around her shoulders, curling slightly at the very ends, but otherwise perfectly straight. She had a long, thin face with a sharp, slightly hooked nose, and lips quirked downwards that looked as if it had been a long time since they had last quirked _upwards,_ at least by anything that was not rote. Her head sat upon a long, spindly neck that gave off the same aura of gangly youth as her hands and wrists and Gerry’s whole body. Having spoken six words, she seemed to think that there was no need for her to speak any more—and Gerry probably would have sympathized with that, were the circumstances something other than what they were. If not for the intense heat that radiated from her body, partly put out but never wholly extinguished, probably by some exercise of will, Gerry probably would have just muttered something in the face of that silence, and gone somewhere else. Where, they weren’t sure exactly, but somewhere else.

But sympathy wasn’t exactly the emotion forefront in their mind, not right now. Maybe later, when they knew more, but for now, there was something riding a _lot_ higher than sympathy.

Now, if only they could figure out what to do about it.

(You know, it would figure that they had a hard time figuring out what to do about it. It would fucking figure that they always had a hard time figuring out what to do about it. What was their natural inclination, now? Oh, yes, it was to stare and stare and stare and _stare_ and not actually act on the information they were getting. Gerry could rise above the natural inclination, could rise above the first impulsive reaction, knew they _had_ to—being able to defy your natural inclinations was what separated you from the animals, after all, was what separated you from those who could no longer fight their natural inclinations, or rather, what had not _always_ been their natural inclinations, but had swallowed up everything that had been them before it became what was natural. Gerry would rise above that, rise beyond it. They would remain themselves. They would remain themselves. They had to remain themselves. They had to remain themselves, as they were.)

The air was cooling, and the air was full of the acrid, slightly queasy odor of burning coffee. Gerry frowned in confusion at that—ah, something to do, at least—looking over in confusion at the coffee pot. Maybe it had burned this morning, but did the smell usually…

Whatever.

“You… you know that coffee’s cold, right?”

Rough and inadequate and probably not very friendly, but it was what Gerry could actually think of, and they couldn’t let the silence go on for very much longer, because they were afraid they might fall into it or that the girl might… They weren’t sure what they were afraid that the girl might do. She was an unknown quantity, in every respect but her nature. Maybe she wouldn’t do anything at all. Maybe. They didn’t know.

As it stood, the girl didn’t do anything about that assertion, at least not now. She just looked at Gerry some more, eyes blinking but expression never changing, hands still curled around her mug of coffee. It looked full. It didn’t look like she had drunk any of it. Gerry couldn’t tell if that expression was supposed to be derisive or confused or something else entirely. They couldn’t tell if that expression was supposed to be anything at all.

Her silence was… After Gerry discarded the original thought, which was veering off into parts unknown, they took the side path, the side path that went somewhere they could actually recognize, and thought to themselves that her silence made it pretty hard to figure out what to say to her. Gerry had sunk into silences like that, a _lot_. They knew this to be the same sort of thing, if only because Gerry was rooting around for something to say the same way they had watched a lot of people flounder when they sunk into this sort of silence. It was kinda funny, sometimes, watching the way their faces would contort and their eyes would flit over Gerry’s face and their twitching shoulders and their fingers digging into their trouser legs. Sometimes, it wasn’t so funny, because Gerry didn’t know what to say any more than the other person did, but that other person always assumed Gerry was doing it on purpose, and among the many, _many_ other things they could not figure out how to say, the way to tell them that they weren’t doing this on purpose was chief among them—well, it was chief among them when it came to saying it in a way that didn’t sound like an obvious put-on.

Maybe… maybe she was thinking about this the same way? Maybe she couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t think of how to tell them that she didn’t know what to say, at least not in a way that she thought would have convinced them properly. Maybe she had heard people tell her she was lying before, maybe she had heard people telling her she was doing this on purpose and she was doing it to be a brat. Maybe she _was_ doing it on purpose, but because she wasn’t any more sure of Gerry than Gerry was of her.

Gerry went and poured the pot full of stone-cold coffee out into the sink and rinsed it out, waiting to smell that burned coffee smell, waiting for it to hit their nose like the slap of a wooden plank, but it never did. Instead, the smell hung fitfully in the air all about the kitchen. They thought it was coming from…

They didn’t know, actually. The knowledge was there, in their mind, but it escaped them, and kept escaping them when they tried to grab onto it. Gerry scrubbed at the coffee pot, and for a moment, all they could smell was the apple-scented dish soap they had grabbed the last time they had been to pick up groceries. It… it must have been there for hours, they supposed, to hang in the air like that, but be out of the pot. They supposed. They couldn’t really make sense of it otherwise, not without the knowledge that kept flitting away from their outstretched hands.

Washing and drying off the coffee pot gave them enough time to hit on what should have been the obvious route from the start—well, obvious to people who regularly had meetings with people they didn’t already know, people whom they were allowed to say more than three words to at a stretch. Maybe it was obvious to _those_ people. It took Gerry a little more time to come round to that point.

Coffee pot set down on the drying rack, they turned on their heel, hands braced on the kitchen counter and suddenly struck with the thought that they should not have had their back turned to the girl for any length of time, let alone for as long as it took for them to wash out the pot. They didn’t know exactly where the thought had come from. It wasn’t some sort of… some sort of _divine insight_ (or infernal insight, or whatever) from the Beholding, at least they didn’t think so. Those things felt heavy and overwhelming, or else felt like a whisper that had been ringing in their mind for ages before it finally rose out to the part of their mind where they could recognize it for what it was. This had just crept up on them the way it crept up on Gerry that they were running late to the station if there was somewhere they wanted to go. It had crept up on them the way Mum’s words crept up on them, sometimes, when they were doing something else and they didn’t expect to hear her words twisting in their mind and scouring the walls clean of everything else currently in their head.

“I’m…” They always stumbled over this part. They wished they didn’t, if only because they didn’t want to be stumbling when it was so rare that they came across someone who looked like they might be close to their age, whom they thought—whom they _thought_ , anyways—might not be on the verge of being… “I’m—“ Gerry wound up staring at the tops of their shoes, never meeting the burning-flame eyes of this girl as they spoke “—I’m Gerard Keay.”

They weren’t sure what it was that always made them stumble. Sometimes, they thought that the other person must have already known who they were, considering how well-known their mum was, and they started to stumble because they just couldn’t see the point of giving out their name when they thought that this other person must have already known who they were, and what their name was, and what was the point if they already knew, the only point had to be in getting their name out of them, and making sure that Gerry wouldn’t be at _too much_ of a disadvantage when they were talking to them.

Sometimes, they really, really were _not_ in the mood to fit rote sounds and syllables into their mouth. Sometimes, those rote sounds and syllables didn’t actually sound like _language_ to their own ears, just sounded like the babble ten billion other mouths had formed at one point or another, and after something was formed by ten billion mouths, it seemed impossible that it wasn’t going to lose at least some of its meaning, if not all of it. The whole thing made Gerry think Spiral, if only because words repeated for so long that they lost all meaning sounded really… well, really _twisty_. Gerry didn’t like to think ‘Spiral’ for too long, not at a stretch; it started to give them migraines, after a while. Like, fascinating stuff, most of the times anyways, and Gerry did like a puzzle to occupy them from time to time, when they were having an art block or they’d hurt their hand too badly to pick up a pen or a paintbrush and hold it without completely fucking ruining whatever they were trying to draw or paint on, but puzzles that tried to pry into their mind and unravel all of their thoughts and make it so they’d never be able to put them back together again weren’t really something you wanted to spend too much time with.

Sometimes, they thought it might have been the name. They thought it might have been the way nothing they had ever given as their name, _any_ of the names they had given as theirs, ever fit right on their tongue, not once they were old enough that they thought they understood why their tongue kept stumbling over the syllables—though the reasons kept shifting, and the name kept shifting, their tongue still stumbled.

And their tongue stumbled now, but the girl gave no sign of noticing it. She tilted her head slightly to one side, barely perceptibly, her eyes never leaving their face, barely even blinking. At last, she half-mumbled, “My name is Agnes Montague.” And said nothing more.

Agnes… Montague. It… Hmm.

Did that name ring a bell? Gerry wasn’t sure if it did or not. There was something scratching in the back of their mind, something that felt like it was _trying_ to be a bell, _trying_ to ring, but they weren’t sure what it was, and when they tried to reach out and catch onto it, it just dissolved in their hands (their spectral, insubstantial mind-hands), and they couldn’t figure out what it was.

They’d probably be better off knowing it now. But there had been a lot of situations Gerry had gotten into where they’d have been better off knowing everything beforehand, and couldn’t have that knowledge, and they wanted to believe…

Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe if something happened, Mum was close enough nearby that she could stop it before it went past the point where it _could_ be stopped. Maybe Mum wouldn’t get too angry that they hadn’t gone out into the back garden, though if Gerry wound up with an injury from their disobedience, they doubted Mum would be feeling too merciful afterwards. Didn’t want anything permanent to become of her vaunted heir (nothing permanent that she could actually prevent, anyways, nothing permanent that went on under her roof; the things that had already happened, and those things that had happened out from under Mum’s nose, those things that could neither be prevented nor reversed, she did her best not to acknowledge), but disliked it markedly when that vaunted heir let anything happen to themselves. (No matter how much or how little ‘letting’ might have anything to do with it.)

They were still curious. That was nothing new. But they were still curious, and they weren’t ready to slip out into the back garden. And besides, if this Agnes was supposed to be some sort of threat, she could easily just _follow_ them out there, and unless Gerry felt like climbing a tree or scrabbling up the soft, paint-peeling wooden planks of the fence, it would be easier to get away from her while still in the house than in the back garden. Mum hadn’t been thinking of _that_ , now had she?

“So… umm…” Still curious, but finding an outlet for it was easier said than done. “…Umm, how long have you been with…”

It was only after the words were out of their mouth that it occurred to them that Agnes might not want to talk about that, the way Gerry didn’t want to talk about that… that thing that had happened to them a couple of years back, under Pall Mall. They tensed a little bit. Under other circumstances, they thought they would have been positive she would have just told them to fuck off, but, you know, Lightless Flame, Desolation, burning, love of burning. It could go a bit worse than all that.

(They were still curious. It wasn’t… It wasn’t often they saw another kid, not one who was like them. They had questions. They always had questions, even if those questions were hard to articulate. They had questions, and maybe she could answer some of them. People who came into all of this as adults didn’t seem to be seeing the same things, or hearing them, or _smelling_ them. Maybe she knew. Maybe she could give the answers.)

Agnes let one of her hands fall from the coffee mug, only to press it flat against the surface of the kitchen table, fingernails glistening wanly in the dim light. “Since…” A strange expression flitted across her mouth. Gerry thought she might have been trying to make it a smile, but none of the associated muscles were moving the way they should, and her eyes remained the same as they had for all the time that she had been looking up into Gerry’s face. “Since many years before you were born,” she mumbled, scraping her fingernails against the surface of the table.

“Oh.” Gerry felt something inside of them wither. “I… I guess that makes sense?”

Yeah, yeah, they supposed that did make sense, at least a little bit. Mum had told them enough about the Cult of the Lightless Flame for them to know the makeup of the cult members’ bodies. Mum had told them enough about the cult and its people that they should have known, _should have known_ , that someone in the cult whose eyes _burned_ like that wasn’t going to be… Well, she wasn’t going to _new_. They should have known. They should have been able to guess. They should have realized they weren’t actually dealing with another kid.

Should have, should have, should have. _There_ was a litany Gerry knew by heart. They swallowed down hard on a rattling scream in their throat as they swam in the litany yet again, and wondered if they should just… Something about Agnes made them think that whatever else she might do, she wouldn’t try to stop them if they just left. She seemed, if not physically bound to her seat, at least bound there by inertia. She barely moved. It seemed as if she weighed so much more than her body could have accounted for, as if gravity worked on her so much harder than it did on Gerry, as if she had to _fight_ to move at all. If they left, she probably would have just stayed—

“How long has it been for you?”

Gerry nearly jumped, though why, they couldn’t really be sure. Hadn’t been expecting a question, maybe, or they _had_ been expecting a question, but not that one. _They_ were always curious _, they_ always wanted to know more about what went on around them, and the players in the scene. Relatively few shared the intensity of their curiosity, they had learned, at least not out here-if you felt a draw to the Eye, you were drawn to its strongholds in particular, and though there was one here, and Mum had told them of it many times, that was not a place they had ever been allowed to go, and Mum’s vehemence on the matter had been…

Gerry liked to push back when Mum pushed. Not one of their smarter traits, but then, they’d always known they weren’t always the smartest around. There were some things they did know not to push back on, though. They weren’t completely hopeless, you know. They didn’t need to learn the same lesson over and over for it to sink in, especially not where Mum’s temper was concerned. When she told them to stay away from that place, they listened.

(Now, as for the occasions when they went courting Mum’s wrath _deliberately_ …)

Relatively few around here shared Gerry’s curiosity, at least not to such a consuming extent. Relatively few cared to be the target of Gerry’s curiosity. Many had no qualms about making their opinion on the subject of Gerry’s curiosity crystal clear, _deafeningly_ clear. What they’d thought was that Agnes would just sink back into her silence—Gerry kept rooting around for what sort of silence it was, for thought it was a very _marked_ silence, none of the words that sprang to mind, ‘moody,’ ‘sullen,’ ‘depressed,’ ‘fuming,’ ever seemed quite to fit—and the next time Gerry tried to poke at her, she’d… Do something that made them not want to poke at her anymore, they didn’t know. So long as it didn’t involve their tongue burned (or melted) out of their head and leaving them unable to ask questions for all time, it probably wouldn’t have been so bad.

A question in return, a question that was the reflection of their own, that was…

Was she actually interested? Gerry couldn’t tell. There were supposed to be a few markers of that, weren’t there? A change in tone, a quirk of the eyebrows, head tilting a little towards the recipient, maybe some sort of gesture motioning them to speak? Gerry didn’t know; Gerry probably would have needed to look it up to get the specifics. But they knew that her tone had shifted not at all. They knew that she had stayed sitting in her chair and her expression had never flickered, that her face was markedly, preternaturally still. They couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. (If she even needed to breathe.)

Gerry couldn’t remember if anyone had ever asked them such a question.

“I…” Suddenly, Gerry wished they had one of their pens or paintbrushes, if only to have something to fiddle with while they stumbled around their words. The air in the kitchen felt hot, again, but they didn’t know just how much that had to do with Agnes. “I… I’m not sure?” They had been in their present state for a little over two years. That wasn’t what she had meant. They would tell themselves that that wasn’t what she had meant. “I’ve always known about this stuff, even when I was little. I’ve always felt…”

Gerry paused, and found they could not start again.

For the first time, Agnes was looking at them with something that was not blank stillness. It looked a little like interest, a little like sadness, and whatever it actually was, it was all still too distant to make out for certain. “I’ve also,” she murmured, barely audibly, before she lifted her rasping voice to a more normal volume, and Gerry could hear the effort involved, could practically _feel_ it granting against their skin. And hers. “I’ve also always felt it.”

Hands fidgeting under the sudden intensity of her previously absent stare, “It’s… it’s not what Mum wanted. But it’s what I’ve got.” _It’s what I am_.

Agnes smiled again, and this time, there was no mistaking the fact that it was a smile, for the muscles were moving the way they ought to move with the mouth they centered around curved up in a smile. It was a smile, but it still did not reach her eyes. It… It wasn’t a smile that didn’t reach the eyes the way Mum’s smiles didn’t reach her eyes. It was not sharp, it was not caustic, it was not brittle, it was not even bitter. The edges of her eyes had softened so much they looked as if they might _melt_.

“I…” A little rattling noise came out of her mouth. Gerry thought it might have been a laugh, or something _trying_ to be a laugh, but it didn’t sound right. It sounded like the pop of an ember out of a dying fire. “I have not been what was expected of me, either. Not for a long time.” The smile dropped from her mouth, as quickly as it had arrived, as if it had never been there at all. “But we have little choice of what we become, do we?”

For a moment, a long moment, a moment like eternity, a moment like dying—and someone _had_ died, hadn’t he? Someone _had_ died, eyes bulging out of his face like they were about to pop out of his skull—they could smell old, musty air again, heavy with mold but drier than they had expected, at least in… at least in some of the places they had gone, when they had gone there. For a moment, a moment like becoming something else, they were in lightless tunnels once more, holding a stolen flashlight and a stolen book—though could it really be stolen if it had been Mum’s originally, could it really be stolen if it felt like it was _meant_ to find its way back to her once more?—standing in the center by the date stone, and staring round and round and round at all of the doorways that broke off from it, and—

And they couldn’t remember which one they’d come in by, they couldn’t remember which one was broken and powerless and couldn’t do anything to them anymore, and that other man was coming back, they could hear him running, could hear him _shouting_ , and—

“I chose this.”

Agnes tilted her head to the side, just a little bit. A little like, at last, she was trying to get a closer look. But she said nothing.

“I chose this,” Gerry repeated, speaking to fill the silence she had left behind her. It needed filling. When it was empty, it felt like—

It felt like them, a little bit. They didn’t want anything that felt like them. They didn’t think they could bear it.

And Agnes shrugged a little bit. Agnes seemed to have found something to say, at last. “When the divine chooses you as a vessel of its power, what does choice have to do with it?”

Gerry was spared having to answer by the sound of Mum’s office door swinging open, so hard it slammed against the wall with a clatter and the sharp thud of metal doorknob against drywall. Gerry jumped, though Agnes remained still. When Molina began to call for her, she remained still then, as well.

But when Molina’s footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs (Gerry could tell the difference between him and Mum immediately; his footsteps were so much heavier, and there was something else about them that was different as well, a sound almost like hollowness, though they knew that couldn’t be right, knew that even if he was candlewax, there had to be something else in him, he couldn’t be _hollow_ ), Agnes seemed to come to life the way a little clockwork dancer would come to life if their little winding key was turned. She slipped both of her hands away from the table and the coffee mug she’d done nothing but nurse the whole time, rising to her feet a little as if her knees didn’t even need to bend. Her head was bowed, firelit eyes trained on the floor. Her hair fell over her face and her shoulders, obscuring her face almost entirely from view.

Not quite entirely, though. Gerry could still make out a little of the light in her eyes. Gerry could still make out the more pronounced downward quirk of her mouth, something closer to a frown than either of her smiles had been to _genuine_ smiles.

“Do you…” She mumbled. The footsteps were drawing closer. “Do you really think…”

“Agnes.” It was strange to hear Molina’s voice bend and soften the way Gerry heard it bend and soften just now. It didn’t fit him, any more than anything about Agnes fit an avatar of the Desolation. But it had bent, and it had softened, when he stepped into the kitchen and laid eyes on her. He didn’t quite touch her, but the hand he stretched out and let stop just shy of her shoulder to gesture her on out of the kitchen seemed like a hand that might have set itself on her shoulder, or perhaps on her back between her shoulder blades, if not for whatever had made him stop short. “Agnes, it’s time to go.”

And the fact that Mum hadn’t followed down after him, offering alternatives of what he had come for or offering veiled insults as to the reasons why he’d not bought anything, told Gerry that whoever had come out better from today’s confrontation, it had probably been Mum. So she’d be in a good mood. So maybe, if she knew Gerry hadn’t done as she asked, she wouldn’t be _too_ angry. Maybe.

Or maybe they could just go out into the back garden now, pretend they’d been out there the whole time, and hope that Mum would never realize they’d done something other than what she had asked of them. And if that seemed like a dizzy hope, like a fool’s hope, than maybe it was. Maybe it was.

For now, Gerry was watching Agnes and Molina make their way out of the kitchen, and down the dimly-lit corridor that would take them out of the house. Something scratched at their throat, something that resolved itself into a soft, almost-stammered, “…Umm… Bye?”

Molina’s back stiffened noticeably, but he said nothing, and did not look back. Agnes, on the other hand, looked back, and met Gerry’s gaze for a long moment.

In the gloom of the hallway, her eyes shone like headlights on a car, if those headlights were lit by fire, rather than electricity. But as gloomy as the hallway was, it wasn’t so gloomy as to keep Gerry from making out her face, not completely.

She was trying to smile. Trying. The muscles around her mouth were trying to arrange into something that would have been recognizable as a smile. Her eyes, though, her eyes locked onto Gerry’s face and stayed there a long moment, and there was no smile in her eyes. Only a question, one Gerry could not make out, and a soft, wet gleam of something like the fire within them starting to go out.

And then there were gone, and Gerry was standing alone in the kitchen, fighting the urge to follow them out the door, and watch until they turned that corner into that alley and disappeared from sight. Fighting the urge to call out to Agnes once more, though what they would have said, they had no idea.

They were alone. They were alone again. Slowly, by increments so small that Gerry barely noticed most of them, the air in the kitchen grew cool once more, as cool as it should be when it was a hot, humid May, the air conditioning in the kitchen was working properly, but one of the windows was cracked open.

The window. They needed to shut that.

Hands still braced on the edge of the window, long after they had forced it back down into its place, Gerry stared out into the unkempt, overgrown back garden, heartbeat slow, mind full of what felt like embers. No longer hot enough to burn, not quite, but warmer than was entirely comfortable. Perhaps that was fitting, considering whose company they had just left behind. Perhaps that was fitting.

They… they didn’t know much about Agnes Montague. They didn’t know where they would have started to find out anymore. They had a feeling that the lack of knowledge was going to nag at them, anyways. But for more than one reason, perhaps. More than one reason, perhaps.

(She wasn’t a child, anymore. Hadn’t been a child in a long time, it sounded like. But still, once upon a time, she had been—

She’d been like them, hadn’t she? Or maybe she’d been something that only bore the vaguest resemblance to Gerry. But there must have been a resemblance, once. Once. Maybe it was so long ago that that resemblance had long since ceased to mean anything. Maybe.)

But given Gerry’s luck, they would probably never see her again. Mum was shocked Molina had had her in his company today. Maybe it was just that Molina was better than most about not springing surprises on Mum when he met up with her to do business. Maybe it was something about Agnes herself. It was probably something about Agnes herself. They couldn’t expect to see her again. They couldn’t expect this to change anything.

No. It wouldn’t change anything. Not for them. The embers cooled a little as they let that assurance wash over them. It would not change a single thing.

It felt a little like dying to think such a thing, but it felt also like… Gerry didn’t know. A little like swinging a blanket over their head on a cold winter night, and trapping all the warmth beneath the fabric, next to their skin. It was what they knew.

Letting out a heavy sigh that at least, at _least_ , did not feel anymore like exhaling steam, Gerry went over to the kitchen table to retrieve Agnes’s mug of stone-cold coffee.

“Oww!”

Or… maybe not.

The surface of the mug was _blisteringly_ hot, and as Gerry spent the next several minutes holding their hand under the cold water that gushed from the tap over the sink, trying not to look at their red, cracked skin, they couldn’t decide whether or not this was more fitting. They wondered what Agnes thought about harm she could not help. _They_ thought about it, you know. They thought about it, and could not decide whether it was more fitting for Agnes to think about it, too.


End file.
